01/17/2013

Attachment to Detail: It's the Little Things

I'm sure this has happended to you at one point or another when documenting with Autodesk Inventor. You start placing Base and Projected views and then maybe a Section, the occasional Auxillary View, and then your Detail views. Design changes happen, documents update, somewhere its 5:00 and someone is enjoying a nice refreshing after work beverage, but not you, you have to fix those Detail views that didn't move with your geometry when the design updated and changed. So how do we get out of work sooner and with less headaches next time? By attaching our Detail views, thats how.

When you place a Detail view in the drawing manager, after the initial placement you can move it around in case you didn't like its initial placement on your view.

This flexibility is also the reason why when a design updates, the detail may or many not move with the update. This can cause incorrect dimensions (as shown below) as well as those pink orphaned dimensions we hate to see.

So next time you place your Detail view, take an extra step and attach it to some geometry. This will essentially anchor it to a point so when it updates in the model the corresponding detail attached to it will also move in conjunciton with it. Simply right click on the center green dot of your detail boundary on your view and select Attach.

So after our adjustment in the model making this design 2 inches longer, the detail stays with the geometry we want so our dimensions still show our intended values.

This won't solve all of your update problems though. If you delete the attached geometry in the model, then the Detail goes loose again, so make a logical decision when you attach your view. Now lets get to that 5:00 beverage.